Anita and Me: Overview (AQA GCSE English Literature): Revision Note
Exam code: 8702
Anita and Me: Overview
The Anita and Me question is part of Paper 2, Section A of your GCSE examination. You are expected to write one essay-length answer to one set question and, unlike with the Shakespeare and 19th-century novel questions, you will not be given an extract from the text. This can seem daunting at first, but this page contains some helpful information, and links to more detailed revision note pages, that will enable you to feel confident answering any question on Anita and Me. This page includes:
Who is Meera Syal?
A summary of Anita and Me
A brief overview of what is required in the exam
Anita and Me characters
Anita and Me context
Anita and Me themes
Anita and Me quotes
Top tips for the highest grade
Who is Meera Syal?
Meera Syal is a British writer, actor and comedian. She was born in Wolverhampton in 1961 to Indian parents who had come to Britain from Delhi, and grew up in Essington, a small mining village in Staffordshire.
Anita and Me, published in 1996, was her first novel, and it is semi-autobiographical. Meena’s Tollington is built out of the village Syal knew, and Meena’s position as the only Indian child in a white working-class community was Syal’s own. Syal is also a screenwriter and performer, best known for Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42, comedy shows that explored race and culture.
Syal writes about racism, poverty and violence, but she does it through a funny, boastful, unreliable nine-year-old. Much of the novel’s meaning comes from the gap between what Meena tells us and what the reader works out. For more on how Syal builds that voice, see the Anita and Me: Writer’s Methods and Techniques page.
Anita and Me summary
Anita and Me is a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, written by Meera Syal in 1996. It is narrated by nine-year-old Meena Kumar, who lives with her Indian parents in the fictional mining village of Tollington in the West Midlands, and it is set in the 1970s.
Meena’s parents have built a close-knit community of South Asian friends and neighbours, all of them “aunties” and “uncles” to Meena, and their home is full of warmth, food and expectation. Meena, however, wants none of it. She is rebellious, she lies, and she is determined not to be the obedient Indian daughter she is supposed to become.
She attaches herself instead to Anita Rutter, a thirteen-year-old white girl who is everything Meena is not: careless, cruel, admired and free. Anita shows Meena the world beyond her parents’ protection, including neglectful families, casual violence, and the racism of the village, which the character of Sam Lowbridge comes to represent.
Events force Meena to choose. Sam’s racist attack on a member of her own community, and his confession that he likes her, make clear that his prejudice includes her too. After a violent confrontation at the Big House, in which Anita’s sister Tracey nearly drowns, Meena chooses not to punish either of them, because she can see that both have been shaped by where they grew up.
Meena turns her back on Anita, works for her exams and passes her eleven-plus. The novel ends with the family preparing to move away to a more diverse area — Meena’s childhood, and Tollington, left behind.
For a more detailed summary, please see the Anita and Me: Plot Summary page.
How is Anita and Me assessed in the exam?
Paper 2 requires you to answer four questions (three on poetry) in 2hrs 15min. That means you have approximately 45 minutes to plan, write and check your Anita and Me essay
Paper 2 is worth 96 marks and accounts for 60% of your overall GCSE grade
The Anita and Me essay is worth 34 marks in total, because it also includes 4 marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar
Section A of Paper 2 contains the Anita and Me question and you are required to answer only one of the two printed questions on the novel
Unlike the Shakespeare and 19th-century novel questions, you will not receive an extract of the novel in your exam
It is also a closed-book exam, which means you will not have access to a copy of the text in your exam either
You will be asked a question that asks you to analyse and write in detail about an aspect of Anita and Me
For a much more detailed guide on answering the Anita and Me question, please see our revision notes on How to Answer the Modern Prose and Drama Essay Question.
Anita and Me characters
The characters you should focus on when revising Anita and Me are:
Meena
Anita Rutter
Sam Lowbridge
Daljit Kumar (“Mama”)
Shyam Kumar (“Papa”)
Namina
It is always vital to remember — when considering Anita and Me, or any text — that characters are deliberate constructions created by a writer for a purpose. These characters often represent ideas, or belief systems, and a writer like Syal uses them to explore those ideas. For more details, please see the Anita and Me: Characters revision notes page.
Anita and Me context
Understanding how to include context in a GCSE essay is challenging, so it is first necessary to figure out what examiners really mean when they talk about context. They define context not as historical information, or biographical facts about a writer, but as the ideas and perspectives explored by a writer through their text. Therefore, the Anita and Me context you should explore in your essay response is not a history of Indian migration to Britain, or facts about Meera Syal’s own life, but ideas about:
Partition and its legacy
Class in a declining industrial community
Religion, heritage and immigration
Lots of these ideas and perspectives are still relevant today, so your own opinions on them are valid, and examiners welcome them in an essay. For a detailed breakdown of the contextual topics listed above, see the Anita and Me: Context page.
Anita and Me themes
Understanding the themes that are prevalent in Anita and Me will enable you to reach the highest levels of the GCSE mark scheme. This is because to be rewarded top marks on your essay, you need to take what examiners call a “conceptualised approach”: a detailed and perceptive exploration of Syal’s ideas and intentions. The main themes explored by Syal in Anita and Me are:
Family relationships
Friendship
Cultural identity
Violence and abuse
You are encouraged to explore other themes that Syal examines in her novel, because bringing original ideas when interpreting a text is always rewarded highly at GCSE. However, the above list makes a great place to start, and detailed breakdowns of each of these themes can be found on our Anita and Me: Themes page.
Anita and Me quotes
It is of course important to learn quotations for your Anita and Me exam question, especially since it is a closed-book exam and you will not have a printed extract on your paper. However, it is worth stating here that examiners value “references” to the novel just as highly as direct quotations: this is when students pinpoint individual moments in the novel, rather than quoting what the characters say. In order to select references really successfully, it is extremely important that you know Anita and Me itself very well, including the order of the events that take place. This detailed chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the plot will help you to revise the chronology of Anita and Me.
Of course, it is also useful to revise a few — very well selected — quotations from the novel that can be used in a variety of essays on different themes and characters. Luckily, we have made that selection for you! For a detailed analysis of each of these quotations, see our Anita and Me: Key Quotations page, and for quotations grouped by character see the Anita and Me: Character Quotations page.
Top tips for the highest grade
Please see our revision pages on the Modern Prose and Drama exam for guides on:
Sources
Syal, Meera. (2004). Anita and Me. Harper Perennial.
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